Zahks = Saks Fifth Avenue. My grandmother spoke with a heavy German accent and so she referred to Saks as “Zahks” (pronounced like “socks” with a Z). Therefore, I refer to Saks as Zahks. Anyway, the windows this year were particularly cute. For the last few years, they’ve had beautiful windows, but they had creepy dolls in them. Moving creepy dolls.
Brrr, instant nightmare for me. It looks like the demonic ghost of Jon-Benet come back to wreak havoc on those who did her wrong. This year, they found a book (or they had a book written for them) called A Flake Like Mike.
http://www.intergalactico.com/work/design/print_illustration/a_flake_like_mike_1.php
It seems like a nice book with a positive message, but here’s the best part: Saks has some kind of relationship with Swarovski, the crystal manufacturer, so everything was BLINGY BLINGY. Me being a magpie, I was in heaven. And the characters from the book are very cute, so I took some pictures of my favorite parts of the windows.
This is a window of how Mike blends in with all the other snowflakes. It’s all done in felt, which is a very matte material, so there’s no flashy anything. But wait! The hexagons around Mike’s face flip over:
MAD blingy bling. Three-dimensonial sparkly goodness. I stood in front of this window for longer than you’re really supposed to, but I was so entranced. It combines so many of my favorite things: hexagons, repeating patterns, the aformentioned sparkly goodness, radiating lines, etc. You know when you play peek-a-boo with a small child, and you cover up your face and then you “Peek-a-boo!” at them and they laugh over and over? That’s what this was like for me. These panels would flip to plain snowflakes and then flip to this and- “Ooooooh!” -I would be dazzled all over again. I found video on YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eu7ieKBGhpM
The other window I loved was the last one. All the snowflakes are happy, but the best part were the snowflakes riding a merry-go-round of sorts at the top of the window. They were the HAPPIEST SNOWFLAKES EVER. You couldn’t stop smiling at them.
And they’re riding around in a circle, you can practically hear them go “Yay!” “Whee!” “Whoo hoo!” as they swing by. I hope this is a trend that Saks keeps going with, the cute, almost kawaii-style windows. With a great deal of crystals. Gotta have crystals. Blingity bling.
[…] lame. Saks didn’t even try, which was shocking. I was hoping they would bring back the happy happy snowflakes, but they just had creepy animatronic dolls and one of those mapped light shows on the exterior of […]